Simon Hattenstone tracks down the legendary 1966 World Cup squad | Football | The Guardian Close This article is 10 years old George Cohen won only one trophy in his football career. Still, if you're going to bag just the one, you might as well make it the World Cup, he says. Three years on, a knee injury ended his career; 10 years on, he was diagnosed with cancer of the bowel; 40 years on, he's beaten the cancer three times, seen his nephew Ben become a World Cup winner in rugby, and is talking about his lucky life. Cohen, the right-back in 1966, was one of the England team's unsung heroes. He grew up in and played for Fulham throughout his career. He was strong and fast and disciplined, he rarely did anything flash like score a goal or beat a man and, like his team-mates, he was the product of a very particular era. They were working-class boys, born to postwar austerity, rationing. Cohen's father was a gas-fitter, his mother worked for London Transport. Cohen, known as Moyshe to his friends despite not being Jewish, was a talented boxer.

He considered making a go of it professionally, but his dad was having none of it. "Use your brains son," he told young George, recommending a career as an electrician. He joined the Fulham ground staff when he was 17. "I got £20 for my signing-on fee, £28 for my monthly wage, and we had a couple of good results where I got another £8 in bonuses, so in the end I took home £50. I said to my dad, 'Look at that, Dad, I got £50 this month' and I could have bitten my tongue. My father was earning £10-12 gross for a 40-hour week. Here was a little twit coming home saying I've earned £50 after tax. My father just looked at me and smiled. I can see the smile now. It haunts me." Look at the pictures from the post-final celebration and the England players, all red shirts and goofy smiles (except for Bobby Moore, who was always immaculate and gorgeous), symbolised innocence, industry, stiff upper lip, triumph. The team became iconic, like the Beatles or the first men on the moon.

And the individuals who made up that team seemed very different from today's footballers - they could just as easily have been down the mines as parading football's greatest trophy around Wembley. I was only three years old when England won the World Cup, but I grew up with their victory. It seemed to be part of the national curriculum. I can't remember how many times we were shown the film of the final on an afternoon in class as an example of what was possible in life. The team made more money than most of their non-playing friends, but they hardly made a fortune. For the majority, their career was over by the time they hit 30. Then they had to settle down and find themselves jobs in the real world. What became of the team of 1966? Did it transform their lives? Do they envy the loaded modern footballer? I was warned finding out wouldn't be easy - the boys of 66 would expect to be paid for their time, and some simply don't like talking about it. Cohen is the first to agree to be interviewed.

We meet at a smart hotel in Tunbridge Wells, the town where he lives with Daphne, his wife of 50-odd years, and where he works as a property developer. He is made for blazers and starched white shirts, and could easily be mistaken for ex-military. How would he describe himself as a footballer? "The biggest assets I had were speed and strength," he says. "I was chunky, never fat. We didn't have the food to be fat." As a boy, he remembers seeing the toffs go into the local private tennis courts, while he and his friends spent their time chasing each other round the block - that's why he was so fast, he says. Did football seem glamorous to him when he started out? He smiles, "You got to eat at some wonderful places. One in particular, the Midland hotel in Manchester was sumptuous. For a youngster, going there for the first time, it was absolutely magnificent. The hors d'oeuvres trolley was something you wouldn't believe - it revolved on an axis like a wheel.

It was a meal on its own." By the time the World Cup finals came round in 1966, he says the squad were knackered. They'd played a full 42-game domestic season, then rushed off on tour to Scandinavia. What is his abiding memory? "The final whistle. I couldn't tell you how tired we were. OK, you were elated, but you couldn't even enjoy the official dinner: our wives were upstairs in a burger bar, which is just about as bad manners as you could get. We'd been away from our wives for ages, and even Nobby Stiles can look attractive after six and a half weeks. Hahaha! Perhaps not! But it was such hard work, so the final whistle was amazing." The longer England has gone without another World Cup win, the greater the achievement of the 1966 team has become. "I recall my nephew, Ben ringing me, he's 27, a huge guy, lovely boy.

Anyway he rang me and said, 'Uncle George, if I'm selected and we get into the World Cup final will you come and see me play,' so I said 'You bet your life, son.' He said, 'You know, if we win and I'm playing, there'll be two world cup winners' medals in the family, what d'you think of that?' I said, 'Son, after having it my own way for 36/37 years, being feted, wined and dined ... I'd be totally pissed off!' Which he thought was highly amusing." But, for many years, Cohen feels he and four of his team-mates were denied their due by the establishment. Over the years, six of the team were honoured in one way or another: two of them were knighted. But Cohen, Alan Ball, Roger Hunt, Ray Wilson and Nobby Stiles were the Forgotten Five - they were given belated MBEs in 2000. When Cohen stopped playing, he retired from the game altogether. He was earning £80 a week, was 29 years old, and wanted to show he could make good in another walk of life.

He used his technical drawing O-level and worked in an architect's practice for two years to learn how buildings were put together. It set him on the path to becoming a property developer. In his autobiography, Cohen talks with crushing honesty about the bowel cancer that almost killed him. When it first struck at 36, he still felt he was the invincible world cup winner. "This can't be happening to me - I'm George Cohen, England footballer, athlete, indestructible. I can't tell anybody. I can't tell my wife." The cancer then spread, and he compared the pain to having water boiled on his pelvis. "A colostomy brings you down to earth, believe me." And there have been other terrible events in his life. In 1971 his mother was killed when she was run over by a juggernaut. In 2000 his brother, and Ben's father, Peter died after being attacked by a group of men in his nightclub. He still feels the pain of both deaths. On the whole, though, he looks back and counts his blessings. The bad that has happened in his life, he says, is the bad that has happened in most of our lives.

"Nobby, I love dearly ... he had a heart attack. Alan Ball was the youngest guy, I'm very fond of him, his wife died recently and his daughter has had cancer, Geoff's daughter has had cancer, Bobby died of cancer, everybody has had shit in their life." Geoff Hurst agrees to meet me with his representative from McDonald's (he is promoting their scheme to provide professional football coaching for millions of kids). I'd been told that, of all the team, he would be the most demanding. After all, he scored the only hat-trick in a World Cup final. He is tall, and well built, carries himself with a swagger. We meet in Cheltenham, in a hotel run by a friend of his. Hurst was never expected to play in the finals. He'd had a couple of good seasons with West Ham, but he was still very much a squad player. After all, the attack consisted of the proven Roger Hunt and the genius Jimmy Greaves, whose goal scoring average is still far superior to any other England player's. But Hurst came on against Argentina and scored. His height offered new options. In the end, team manager Alf Ramsey did the unthinkable and dropped Greaves in the final.

Hurst was always a hard worker. He tells me with pride, "Mr Billington, my teacher, said, 'Whatever Geoffrey Hurst decides to do, he is one of those who will make a success.' " He passed O-levels in maths, science, technical drawing and metal work. Hurst's father had played professional football at the lower levels. "He was only 5ft 8in, but he always made the point to me that if he couldn't get the ball he'd head the other guy in the back of the head. Hehehehe! He was a bit of a hard nut, my father." Hurst senior took his son into the garden as soon as he could walk to coach him in an important lesson - how to kick with both feet. "It's no coincidence that in the World Cup final I scored a goal with my right and a goal with my left. That stemmed from my dad taking me into the garden when I had a nappy on." As a boy he was focused more on cricket than on football, but West Ham gave him a trial and took him on at £7 a week.

"I was 15, it was 1957; I'd not thought of any other career options, to be honest." His career took off slowly. At 20, he was still playing more cricket - he played once for Essex. Then, suddenly, he became a regular at Wembley - at 22 he played for West Ham in the FA Cup final, at 23 he was back in the Cup Winners' Cup final, then a year later it was the big one. "It happened so quickly that perhaps you don't appreciate it. Bobby Moore and I had been to Wembley three years in a row. This was easy: win, win, win. It's not until 20 years later that you realise what you've achieved and have a sense of fulfilment." Now, if he's recognised and pointed out, it's because he's the one in the television programme, They Think It's All Over, shooting the ball in the net. How did it feel coming off the pitch having scored a hat-trick? "I didn't know I had - I didn't know the final goal had counted. My first emotion was relief.

Then you're in a daze." I feel as if there is an elephant in the room when talking to Hurst - Jimmy Greaves. Greaves, England's favourite forward, never received a winner's medal because there were no substitutes in those days. Does he think it changed Greaves's life? "It certainly changed my life dramatically. I've not spoken to Jimmy about it, because in football if you're in, you're in, if you're out, you're out: there's never any sympathy. That's football. Jimmy was a lovely fella and a great, great player. I think a lot has been made about Jimmy's disappointment and what happened to him afterwards, the drinking ... but I don't think ..." He stops. "Jimmy had a family bereavement, a child, which was obviously far more important, as it should be. I think that had an effect on him, but that's only my opinion as an outsider." Hurst played for another 10 years. "People just remember the one game, but for West Ham I played 500 games and scored 250 goals." He then managed Chelsea where, for the first time, he was unloved and unwanted.

At the age of 40, he found himself queueing at the dole office to collect his £25 a week. "Some players might have found it embarrassing, but I'm very matter-of-fact. Everything I did from the time I got the sack, which was the low point of my life, was with the aim of getting a job and some kind of career. Most of us have had to go on the dole at some time - great players, probably better than me." He ended up working in mechanical breakdown insurance. He took his qualities as a player - industrious, reliable, intelligent - into business. One day he did a presentation and offered his card and the guy asked what the MBE stood for. Quick as a flash, Hurst replied "mechanical breakdown expert". Does he consider himself wealthy? "Comfortable." A millionaire? "If I cashed in all my assets, I'd be called a millionaire. I don't necessarily think a millionaire today is wealthy." How does Hurst think the current England team would do against the boys from 1966? Surely player for player the current crop are stronger? He looks at me dismissively. "No.

We had the best goalkeeper in the world I've seen. We've never had anyone at the back who plays like Bobby Moore. Bobby Charlton played 100 games for England and scored one in every two games from midfield. Jimmy Greaves was arguably the greatest goalscorer we've ever had. And Ray Wilson was a world-class fullback. The backbone - keeper, Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton - we've never had any three players like that in those key areas at the same time. I was asked to do a thing for McDonald's combining the two sides." And? "I had Banks in goal, pushed Ray Wilson over to right back, Ashley Cole, Jack Charlton, Bobby Charlton, Bobby Moore, Stephen Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Alan Ball, Geoff Hurst, Wayne Rooney." The biggest difference between the two teams is, he thinks, character. So much of the character of the 1966 team is shaped by struggle. "Bally was rejected as a kid by a number of clubs, and he was the best player in the final. Roger's father wanted him to do anything else but play football.

Gordon Banks only became a goalkeeper because he couldn't make it as an outfield player." Would he like England to win the world cup this year? "Yes, of course. But I'm very selfish - I don't want anybody to score three. If we win 4-0 and Rooney scores 2 and Owen scores 2 that would suit me just fine thank you." Back at the office, I decide to give Nobby Stiles a ring. If I've got Hurst, Nobby is going to be easy-peasy. After all, he's the happy-go-lucky goofball who'd do anything for anybody. "Hello, is that Nobby?" "Yes, I'm just going out." "I'm doing a big article about the 1966 team and virtually all of you have agreed to speak to me ..." "Don't want to do it," he says. "But it will be great ..." "I'm sorry. Thank you, but no." A couple of Stiles' friends say he's become more introverted since his heart attack in 2002. Stiles is the last of the bunch you'd expect to be introverted.

The way he ran round the pitch, half-crazed, after the final whistle, the specs and teeth - if he hadn't been a footballer, he would have made a great comedian. Martin Peters, the scorer of the "other goal" in the final, was known as the "ghost". A team-mate of Moore and Hurst at West Ham, then known as the Academy of Football, he was a new kind of player - rather than sticking to one position, he would ghost all over the park, emerging from nowhere to score any number of goals. Even today, there is something ghostlike about Peters. I am waiting for him at the train station in Shenfield, Essex, close to his home. He emerges out of nowhere. The 1966 boys say he and Bobby Moore were the smartest members of the team (and that George Cohen was the smartest, intellectually). His black leather jacket and polo neck give the appearance of confidence, but when he starts talking I am struck by his diffidence. At 15 years old, Peters played in front of 90,000 fans for England schoolboys against Germany.

His father worried about him taking up football professionally - he had banked on him being a Thames lighterman, working on the barges as he had done. Peters grew up in Dagenham and became head boy at his secondary modern because he was good at sport. Despite his ability, he says he was desperately shy as a young man, and naive. "People think I was a bit of a fancy dan because I was a ball player. I would read the game and pick things off, but people who know me know I could put my foot in." Peters was famously described as being 10 years ahead of his time. He won his first cap earlier just before the World Cup finals began in 1966 at the age of 22. He didn't play in the first match of the finals, but came in for John Connelly when Alf Ramsey called him in for the second match of the finals, wanting to change the play. Ramsey, who had miraculously guided Ipswich to the first division championship, was an establishment man through and through. "He was strict," says Peters. "I wouldn't say he was scary. You knew he had your best interests at heart.

When we were watching television, he'd come in at 10pm and say, "Goodnight gentlemen," and we knew we had to go to bed straight away." What would he make of the current England squad? "He wouldn't take no shit. When that Rio Ferdinand thing blew up about the drugs, and the England team were going to go on strike he would have said, 'Fine, we won't see you again then.' They would have gone, never to return." How does Peters think today's squad would fare against the boys of 1966? "It would be a tough game," he says, "and I reckon we'd have to settle for a draw." He pauses. "But then again, they are in their 20s and we are in our 60s and 70s." He grins. I ask Peters what his main memory is of the final. He asks if I want the real answer or the official version. The real, I say. "Well obviously scoring my goal. I say I scored the most important goal because without it we would have lost 2-1." And the official version?

"The final whistle when we'd achieved what we set out to." Did victory mean more because Germany was the opposition? "I think so, the end of the war was only 20 years before, and a lot of people would have that in mind. My wife's dad lost three sisters in East Ham. A bomb came down and hit his house. The three sisters were called Kathleen, Doris and Winifred and my wife's name is Kathleen Doris Winifred." The night of the victory, Hurst had made arrangements to go to Danny La Rue's club, where Ronnie Corbett was performing, but Peters decided on a night in. "I didn't go because I was knackered and I hadn't seen my wife for four weeks, so we stayed in and had a bottle of champagne in our room in the Royal Garden, Kensington. Jack Charlton went to a party in the East End. Got pissed as a rat and slept on the floor." Peters went on to play for Spurs and Norwich. In his Spurs days he finally began to feel like one of the lads. "We had a good camaraderie. Once you get into that Spurs syndrome, piss-takers, you either live or die with them.

I remember when Ralph Coates came they gave him almighty stick, and he got round to being one of the boys eventually." Why such stick? "Everything he did. Wearing the same underpants two days on the trot. Things like that. Silly things. I was with Ralphie last night. Good guy, Ralphie." Peters captained the England side that drew with Poland and failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup finals. That was probably his worst moment in football. "We had a good team, and when you think Poland finished third in the World Cup ... but it was just one of those games. Three weeks before we'd played Austria at home and won 7-0, and everything went right, but on that night everything went wrong." Peters had a brief, disastrous stint in management at Sheffield United. After they were relegated, he quit football and eventually went to work in the warranty business at the same company as Hurst. After 17 years, he was made redundant. "They didn't give me any reason. Seventeen years is nearly as long as the football.

I was gobsmacked." Now back in the same business, he's busy with after-dinner talks, has just completed his autobiography, The Ghost Of 1966, drives a Jag, has a second home in Menorca. Yet there is something melancholic about him. He has a lovely laugh, but he finds it hard to look you in the face. When I question him more closely, he tells me he's on antidepressants: "Only a mild dose, but they take away the stress." The rest of the 66 team are proving elusive. I find a number for Jack Charlton, but his son John tells me he's in Spain throughout January. Alan Ball is in the Caribbean. Ray Wilson is said to be somewhat reclusive and Bobby Charlton "a law unto himself". Then there's a message on my voicemail. "Hello, this is Ray Wilson, I hear you're trying to get in touch with me." Wilson was possibly the first modern fullback. Before the 60s, fullbacks were big bruisers pitted against speedy, nimble wingers. It made no sense. So fullbacks became fast and nimble, like Wilson, and could overlap and attack in their own right.

Wilson meets me at Huddersfield train station. Big woolly hat, sweater, boots, grey beard, bald head and stony, blue eyes. He drives me to his house, a cottage alone in a field surrounded by silence and fresh air you inhale like cold water. Wilson is tough, funny, warm and surprisingly vulnerable. He grew up in east Derbyshire and is the only one from 66 to tell me he had an unhappy childhood. His mother and father split up when he was seven. "Very few people split up in those days. My mother had a fair character and saw things she didn't like, so they split. Then she went to work away as a chef," he says. Pat, Wilson's wife, makes us a lovely thick pea soup and ham sandwiches. He looks out of the window on to the bare hills as he talks. "I was shipped about, staying with aunties and uncles who didn't particularly want me, which I can understand - they had children of their own. "I didn't like school. I played hooky for about six weeks, and when they caught me and took me back into school, nobody had missed me. Hehehe!" It's a painful laugh.

"Almost suicidal, isn't it? I was about 13." Eventually his mother returned home with a new man and young Ray settled down with them. "He was a smashing bloke, a hairdresser, and I lived with them and my life was better for that." At 15, Wilson went to work on the railways, repairing wagons in Shirebrook. If he put in the overtime, the money wasn't bad. "I could knock off anything between £8 and £10." At 17, a schoolteacher recommended him to Huddersfield Town FC. His experience had toughened him - in a way, he says, it made him too tough, unsympathetic. When he got called up for national service in Egypt, he came across young men - boys, really - who couldn't cope. "Some of the sergeant majors were cruel bastards. Some of these kids had hardly had their nappies taken off. Can you imagine going from that to standing in front of a guy who's saying, 'You snotty-nosed little twat, get out of there'? When I was in the barracks at night, you could hear at least a dozen of them crying themselves to sleep.

And I used to say, 'For fuck's sake, shut up.' " He wouldn't be like that any more, he says. "Thank God." His strength as a player, Wilson reckons, was being a decent reader of the game. "I had the equipment to be a fullback." Wilson often talks of himself in terms of equipment. "I never used to dive in, I was booked only once in my career, and I was gifted by being quick. George [Cohen] was remarkably quick for a big lad. To be honest, I think the only thing I had over George was that I was a better player." It sounds as if he's joking, but he's not - his ability on the ball counted for little in the grand scheme of things. By 1966, Wilson was England's most experienced player approaching the end of his career. "Can I say if I had my time over again I'd like to have done it like Alan or Martin or Geoff, who were just starting their careers." For financial reasons? "No, not financially. They went on to play as World Cup winners, and most lads would be wetting their knickers playing against people like that.

It was just a mental thing." The morning of the World Cup final, he and Bobby Charlton, who he roomed with, decided to go for a walk. "We woke up pretty early. We strolled in from the Hendon Hall Hotel and walked up to London and back again. Nobody recognised me, but obviously one or two recognised Bobby. I used to dread going anywhere with Bobby. Sometimes we'd be going back from London to Manchester on the train and I'd be with him, and everybody would be [he whispers], 'Bobby Charlton'. Because you could forget Bobby Moore and all that; you were looking along the same line as bloody Garincha and Pelé. When we went to Chile in 62, we stayed in this little mining village where I don't think they'd ever seen a football match, and as soon as we arrived it was, 'Bobby Charlton, Bobby Charlton'. It didn't matter where you went." Did he like it? "I don't think he did, no. I don't think anybody with any sense would enjoy that." Wilson thinks the 1966 final is, with hindsight, overrated. "I don't think it was that much of a game, to be honest.

People just get overwhelmed by the finish, the extra time, was it a goal, wasn't it a goal." How hard was it for Jimmy Greaves not being picked? "Oh, he's done bloody well to cope with it. If he said, 'I've got over it, it doesn't bother me,' I'd find it difficult to believe him. That was the only chance." In the end, though, its impact on Hunt might have been equally devastating. He played for Liverpool and, at the time, Wilson says there was a huge north-south divide among fans. "Roger got some awful stick. All these people with no memory who think Roger took Jimmy's place - they forget it was Geoff, because he scored the hat-trick and he's a Londoner. It was embarrassing. They used to sometimes boo Roger. He stopped playing for England, told Alf he'd had enough." Wilson was rarely recognised as England hero Ray Wilson. That's the way things were in those days - few footballers were celebrities, and no fullbacks were. In the close-season, he began working with his father-in-law, a joiner-cum-undertaker, and eventually ended up running the business by himself.

Is embalming a highly skilled job? "Oh yeah, and you've got to have guts. As an embalmer you move the blood out of the body and replace it with something like an acid thing. It was gruesome but I knew I was able to control myself ... I have taken people with me to remove bodies who have thought, Ach, I can do this, and within 10 minutes they've been spewing up." He's retired now. The thing about the funeral business, he says, is that it takes only one tiny thing to go wrong to spoil the occasion. "I tell you what, son, playing football is a lot easier than directing a funeral." He stops to think. "Mind you, I suppose I was more gifted at the football." A player gives me Gordon Banks' number. "Good luck," he says. Banksy is still widely regarded as the world's greatest goalkeeper. Not long after the 1970 World Cup, he lost an eye in a car crash. These days, he does some after-dinner talking and he's on the Pools Panel with Roger Hunt. "Hi, is that Gordon?" "Yes." "My name is Simon Hattenstone.

I'm doing this piece on the boys from 66. I've already met Geoff and Martin and George and ..." "Is there a fee involved?" he asks. "No, I'm sorry, we don't pay money, but ..." "I'm not interested then." The phone goes dead. I try my number for Hunt. He's away. I try again and again, until I feel like a stalker. Weeks later, I get through. He doesn't say much, but he's friendly. By now, I've no pride left and beg him. "The trouble is, I think everything there is to be said has been said. I'll think about it and ring you back ..." Hunt finished his career at Liverpool and went to work in his father's road haulage firm. He sounds lovely. I wonder why he's so resistant - is it because of his final unhappy chapter with the England fans? I never get to find out. He doesn't call back, But Jack Charlton does. "I'll meet you at the station, son." Even at 70, he looks like a stopper. He's 6ft 2in, red-faced, and all jutting bones.

He lights a Lambert & Butler and starts the car. It's freezing, and the streets are laced with snow. He lives half an hour outside Newcastle and, as he drives, he talks about how bored he is by today's football, how they spend all their time passing the ball square rather than attacking, how he has always been a bit of a gobshite, and how the England manager's job was the only one he ever applied for and the FA didn't even reply. At his house, he blows on his hands and puts on the kettle. Was he always going to be a footballer? "I had no choice. I was from a footballing family called the Milburns. My mother's father had four sons, all professional footballers. Their father was a goalkeeper. Jackie [the legendary Newcastle United centre forward] was my cousin, so I had no choice." Charlton's father, however, had no interest in football. "He was a boxer and he was a miner. He won the money to buy my mother's wedding ring, fighting down the back row, bare-knuckled." Jack and Bobby grew up playing in the local leagues.

They both played for Ashington YMCA under-18s when Jackie was 15 and Bobby 13. "Put it this way, we went the whole season and we drew one match." They won the others? "No, we lost the rest." Jack wasn't interested in school and didn't pass any O-levels. "But I've got more doctorates than anybody else I know." He shows me them on the wall - two from Leeds University, one from Newcastle, one from Limerick, another from Dublin. He grins. "Ridiculous. Now, if they gave me something to do with fishing or hunting or football, but it wasn't ... it was, like, science." At 15, Leeds asked him to sign, but he didn't want to leave home, so he went down the mines. "I worked on the bank, on top. It was terrible in the pits." At 17, he escaped to Leeds United. Then, at 18, he was called up for national service and found himself captain of the regimental team - unheard of then: usually it was an officer. He returned to Leeds and a first-team place at 20.

Leeds was a nothing team back then and Jack, for all his strength, wasn't much of a player. He almost went to Liverpool and Manchester United, but both transfers fell through. "I went to see Matt Busby at United. He said, 'We've got a lad we want to try before we spend money and sign you, so can you wait till the end of September,' and I said, 'You can stick it up your arse.' I actually said that, and I walked out and said I'm going back to Leeds and I'm going to apologise for all the aggravation I've caused." Until Don Revie arrived, Jack found it hard to accept the primitive coaching - the only training they did with the ball was playing five-a-side in the car park. "I couldn't believe it. Nobody ever taught you anything about football. But that all changed when Revie came." While people had been predicting an England future for Bobby Charlton ever since he could kick a ball, Jack had rarely been talked about as an international. Revie taught him discipline, told him not to rush forward at every opportunity, leaving the defence exposed.

"He said if you screw the nut, you can play for England, you." Jack also had an eye on his business sideline - the cloth trade. In his early twenties, he'd worked in a suit factory in Bradford and later on, he'd sell cloth to fellow players and have suits made up for them. "In fact when we went to Mexico in 1970 I provided the cloth for the England suits we had made. It was a very light-coloured grey suit." When he had his first call-up at 29, Jack, one of the most primitive stoppers in England history, found himself partnering the most urbane centreback to play for England, Bobby Moore. Ray Wilson had told me Jack would spend the match screaming at Bobby to get rid of the ball as he would casually chest it down and stroll out of defence. What was Moore like to play with? "Bob was an amazing player. He was the slowest player I ever played with, without question, but no one ever ran him." Moore died in 1993, not really a rich man. "Strangely enough, I don't think he did make money," Jack says.

"Bob being captain of the team should have been the number one showpiece person, but he wasn't." Why not? "I've no idea." Did that upset him? "I don't know. I never saw Bob upset, he was always smiling, always waving at you when you went into a club or bar. 'Jacko,' he'd say. He always called me Jacko." The FA did little to look after the boys of 66, Jack says. Eventually, they were given a pot of £22,000 for winning the World Cup, and it was Moore who decided the bonus should be split evenly between squad members. Aside from the bonus, Jack says, "We got £60 for playing for England. It wouldn't have mattered if you got nothing - you played for England." Would he like to be one of those players on 100 grand a week today? "Of course I would. If they're daft enough to pay it, then I'm daft enough to take it... I'm quite a wealthy lad now, but most of what I've got is from what I've done since. A bit of advertising here, a bit of this there, a bit of that, investments.

I've made a lot of investments." Jack Charlton was the one member of the 66 team who stayed in football and made an unqualified success of it - most famously taking Ireland to the quarter-finals of the World Cup in 1990. Why does he think he did better than brother Bobby, who briefly managed Preston? "I prepared myself. Coaching is about teaching, knowing how to put your point over, and I spent years and years and years at Lilleshall learning that. If people call me a manager, I say, no, I'm a coach, because I worked with the players all the time. But I don't think our Robert did." On one of his wallsare individual portraits of the England team, all of them signed. I look at Bobby's comb-over haircut and ask Jack if he ever suggested his brother should do something about his hair. "No, I never," Jack answers sharply. "Y'see, I've had three brothers and every one of them starting to lose their hair when they were early 20s, which for a young lad is a disastrous thing. I was the only one who kept me hair on for a while. Y'feel for them. I remember going to see this comedian.

It was at the Savoy, actually. And he made a joke about the way our kid used to throw his hair over his head, and when he was finished I went to his dressing room and I said, 'You're out of order. It was a stupid joke. It upset me greatly, actually. I said he's done more for his country than you will ever dream of doing, and people like you tend to piss on him over something like that, and it's very hurtful to him, and it hurts me as well." Jack and Bobby have a strange relationship. Jack, who is two years older, will defend "our kid" or "our Robert" to the hilt if an outsider criticises him. But it is no secret that Bobby and Jack have their issues. Their conflict apparently goes back to their mother - she is said to have disapproved of Bobby's wife, Bobby never forgave her and refused to visit on her deathbed, and Jack never forgave Bobby for not visiting. He normally sees Bobby at the annual 66 reunion. I tell Jack I'm having trouble with a few of the boys. He laughs when he hears what Banksy said.

"If you'd caught me on a bad day, I'd have probably asked for money." As for Nobby, he says, just tell him Big Jack said he has to do it and he'll do it. After my visit to Jack, I get straight on to Nobby Stiles. "I've just seen Jack," I say, "and he says if he's done it, you've got to do it!" "No, sorry," says Nobby. "I'm not interested." So much for Big Jack's influence. But, by way of consolation, I get a surprise call from Old Trafford. Sir Bobby Charlton is happy to talk. We meet at the ground in an executive room with a magnificent view over the pitch. England's all-time leading goalscorer spent his whole playing career here. So many people remember him from TV footage - the power shots from distance - and little else, but ask anybody who played with him and they will tell you he had everything: pace, balance, amazing control with both feet. He was bright, went to grammar school, but spent his days gazing out of the window, dreaming about his future. He knew he would play for England. "I found fairly early that the game wasn't difficult for me.

I didn't have any difficulty with the running, with controlling the ball, with passing, and you saw others who found it unbelievably difficult ..." When I was a little lad, me and our Jack used to go to the park on a Sunday. There were two or three pitches, and the big lads all wanted me to play for them. There were matches that started about 8am and they would continue till 8pm.It just went on forever. " Bobby used to watch Newcastle and sit as close as he could to the players. "If I wanted to see Matthews or Finney, I'd get on the corner flag, you know, and if it was a midfielder, I'd get on the halfway line. Me and our Jack went maybe three four times a year, usually when a good team was playing." He would go to the park alone to practise inswinging and outswinging corners with either foot. Bobby knew he wasn't going down the mines. Every Friday his dad would take him to the pit to pick up his wages.

"You'd have to wait for him in the canteen and they'd give you a little meat pie and a gill of milk, and I'd see all these fellas coming up from the shaft and the ones that were black were all smiling because the shift was over, and the ones that were going in were all miserable. And they had this up and down every day, and I thought not for me, if I can help it." At 15, he played at Wembley for England schoolboys. He couldn't believe a football pitch could be so perfect. "Wembley was so beautiful. It was just made for me. I used to love passing the ball, and it used to go where you meant it to go. True as anything. It was like a billiard table." Through the summer, scouts were knocking on his parents' door, pleading for Bobby's signature. He played his first game for Manchester United against Charlton, just after recovering from an ankle injury - the only injury he suffered on a football pitch in his career. He scored, of course - twice. He looks out on the pitch and describes the goals as if it were yesterday. "My first was a volley with me dicky foot, about six yards out.

The second was a snap shot." Was he lucky or did he look after himself exceptionally well? "Errr, I was a bit of a coward. I didn't always go where angels fear to tread. No. If I was asked to tackle somebody, by the time I made my mind up it was too late." Bobby Charlton is a softly spoken, serious man who rarely laughs. His friends believe his character was shaped by the Munich air disaster. Soon after he broke into Matt Busby's team, United were involved in an air crash after a European Cup match in February 1958. Half the team were killed, including Duncan Edwards then regarded as England's greatest player. "It doesn't get any worse," he says. "But I was lucky. I was hardly injured and I was able to play within a few weeks." Does he have nightmares? "I think about it a lot ... This was a great team with great players, and suddenly it was no more." He says that United's European Cup victory in 1968 means as much to him as the World Cup. "It was important that Man United became champions of Europe because of Munich.

It was like the holy grail." Did he realise what they had achieved when they won the World Cup? "I knew straightaway because our kid came over to me and he says, 'Well, what about that, kid?' And I said, 'Well our lives will never be the same now, kid. Your Peles were playing, your Eusebios were playing, your Riveras, all the best players in the world, and we beat them.' " Does he still get emotional talking about it? "Yep. I don't cry when we lose, I cry when we win. I can cry if I see one of our athletes win a gold medal. You realise how much work went into it, how hard it was to do, and it moves me that." What made the World Cup team exceptional, he says, was Ramsey's understanding of balance. "You'd look at Nobby Stiles and think, 'He's never an England player,' but at what he did, he was the best. He was a great, great player, Nobby Stiles, never mind what people say. And my brother was a very, very effective player.

They didn't look elegant players, but if you have 11 elegant players you win nothing." In the two-year run-up to the finals, England beat everyone but Brazil. "We were afraid of no one. People don't realise we were the favourites." How much did his record 49 goals mean to him? "It's funny really because I never thought of myself as a goalscorer. I was a midfield player or a winger. If you played a bad team maybe I'd score two or three goals. When it looked like Gary Lineker was going to beat 49 goals, people were saying, 'I hope you keep the record,' and I was thinking, well, I'm not really bothered. He's a striker, you'd expect him to score more goals than me, y'know. I don't actually understand how I was the leader goalscorer." He seems to be thinking aloud. "What it is, I played a long time and I was never injured." Of all the team, Bobby Charlton seems to have the most romantic attachment to football. In one way, he appears the most dour, but he talks about the game with awe. I asked all the players when they last played - most said decades ago.

Why return to the game when you can no longer do what you did? When I ask Bobby, he shuts his eyes, as if picturing it. "I played about 18 months ago, when I was 67, in Portugal, for 10 minutes. It was a charity game and I went in the dressing room and said to Alex, 'Give us five minutes.' And he said, 'Maybe, maybe.' " How did he do? "I did all right, but I said, 'Well, this is it, this is ridiculous, I'm not going to play any more.' But I love it." Bobby went on playing until he was 36. He couldn't bear to give up the game. He briefly managed Preston before falling out with the board. Does he think Jack was a more natural manager than him? "Well, I don't know. He went into coaching. I've never been into coaching really. I don't think he's any different to me ..." For a moment, it sound as if there's an internal argument raging in Charlton's head, but he quickly resolves it. "Well he is, he is. Of course he is. He's a different character all together." In what way?

"I think he's ... a bit more abrasive, and I think he does things some times without thinking. I always try to see both sides if I can." Are they close to each other? "No ... we're all right. I mean most brothers and most families have little tiffs. We have our own tiffs." When he gave up football, he opened a travel agency in Hale, Manchester, and returned to Old Trafford in an unpaid capacity as a director. Has anything given him as much pleasure as playing? "Noooh." The only thing that came close, he says, was when United came from behind to win the European Cup a few years ago - they equalised with a few minutes to go and won it in the last minute of injury time. "I don't know what happened then. I honestly don't know where I went or what I did. Magic! I've never felt as happy at a football match." We shake hands as I leave. "It's a great game," he whispers. "A great game. What would the world do without football, for God's sake?" The boys of 66 are having an official get-together. Everybody but Bobby Charlton will be there for the corporate lunch at London's Grosvenor House hotel.

The players will receive a considerable fee for talking to more than 1,000 City types. I plead with the organiser to allow me in. He refuses, so I decide to blag my way in instead. I reckon this is my last chance to get to the refuseniks - Nobby Stiles, Roger Hunt and Banksy. I put on my best suit, ask security where the lunch is and stroll into the ballroom. I buy a beer, not quite believing it's so easy. Hardly any people are here yet, but strangely I catch sight of the three who have snubbed me. They're little changed. Nobby still looks like the cheeky half of a double-act, Roger looks strong and smart, Banksy is instantly recognisable. Biding my time, I feel a tap on my back. "Excuse me, Sir, who you are with today?" "HSBC," I say. I'm the world's worst liar. Minutes later, I'm at the front door. Outside, Jack Charlton is snatching a quick cig. "What are you doing here, son?" he says.

"I've just been chucked out." I ask him if he's in London just for this lunch. "Nah. I'm here for St Patrick's Day. I came down for a dance with all the girls." I finally get through to Alan Ball, who's been in the Caribbean. He suggests I visit him at his home in Southampton. Outside his house, I get a sense of deja vu. Again, it's in the middle of nowhere, again it's a beautiful bungalow. He greets me with a huge smile. His hair is still red (just), his voice still high-pitched, and his humour still good. Ball was the youngest player in the team - barely 20 - a tenacious goal-scoring midfielder, and man of the match in the final. Like Hurst, his father had been a professional footballer. Alan Ball senior was the classic journeyman - plying his trade at the likes of Oldham, Rochdale and Southport. Ball's first memory is the smell of dressing rooms. "Shocking! Liniment and dubbin and sweat." His father's ambition was for him to become a better footballer than he had been.

Every night, Ball did his homework with his dad at their home near Bolton - an hour's training with a ball. But clubs turned him down because he was too small. "I promised my father after I'd been rejected by Wolves and Bolton - I was 16 - 'Dad, I will play for England before I am 20.' And I played for England when I was 19 and about 360 days." He wrote to every club in the area, and eventually got his start at Blackpool on £7.50 a week, and life couldn't have been better. "It was just Disneyland. Fantastic. It was everything you wanted to do in your life. When I stopped playing, people said, 'D'you miss playing?' What? Miss playing? It was the most ..." And he stops, he can't find a superlative quite superlative enough. "I had the most incredible years, just training, laughing, playing football in the morning, then getting paid at the end of the week, and paid more if you won - come on! I knew how lucky I was. My father made sure I did.

First of all he taught me how lucky I was then he never let me forget how lucky I was." He lived up to his name in the final - a ball of flaming energy, chasing, harrying, tackling and running to the end. What is his memory? "The final whistle. We'd done it. All I kept thinking about was me, after being rejected not three and a half years before, proving myself right to my dad." As a player, Ball always took his father with him to negotiate a new contract. And his father always insisted on the one thing - that his salary was performance related. "When I went to Everton, he said to them, 'What's the biggest earner in your club?' and they told him, and he said 'I don't want that for him.' I'd just been in the World Cup team, British record transfer fee, and my dad said, 'If he does that, he gets that, and if he does that, he gets that.' He wanted a performance-related contract to make sure I worked for the money. And we won the league." After Ball finished playing, he met with mixed success as a manager.

He always seemed to be in charge of clubs on the precipice - sometimes he hauled them back, sometimes he chased them straight over. By the time he was managing, he says, attitudes of players had changed. How? "Money. Getting vast amounts takes away the hunger, that little edge. Players of today say, 'I go out and play with the same desire ...' Nah. It cannot possibly be that way when the comfort zone comes so quickly and so easily. "I was brought up that the club was the be-all and end-all and you were its servant. Not only that, you were subservient to the fans - you had to go and perform for those fans who in the old days were paying your wages. The agents are now number one, after the agents and the players, there is the chairman and then the manager, and the last two things now, which has totally flip flopped, are the fans and the club. That has come about because of the power that the money and the trading and the Bosman thing [the right for players to be free agents at the end of their contract] has given these players. Their era will be talked about because it will come back to an even playing field later on.

But as an older player I don't have one ounce of regret because I've had the best." At the time he was playing - between 1964 and 1980 - Britain was constantly producing world-class players, the old English first division was a thrilling mudbath, and just about any team could win any trophy because money didn't dictate. It's two years since Ball's wife, Lesley, died. They had been together since before 66, and he always talked about them as a team. She prepared him for her death. "She said, 'I want everything shared between our three kids.' And she asked me to sell my World Cup medal because she said you can't split that in three." How have the past few years changed him? "It's changed me in that you know you have to come to terms with this life. It is a beautiful life, and an incredible world, but you've also got to be aware of what's round the corner, and in the big scheme of things football isn't that important." Before I leave, Ball takes me into his office, "the treasure trove".

The only trophy on display is for golf, but there are wonderful historic football pictures on the wall - mates like Mick Channon and Charlie George, heroes like Nat Lofthouse and Denis Law and, of course, Hursty and Mooro and all the 66 boys. What made them so strong as characters and as a team? "I tell you what made us what we were - we had this wonderful feeling that we were still part of the people. Every street in England had a footballer living in it. Not any more. They're behind big barbed wire fences, they've got security, they've got blacked-out windows, they hire clubs to go and have a night out. We were ordinary, approachable people. You were welcome to walk the streets, you were patted on the back, you were touchable, reachable." · To inquire about "the boys of 66" for after-dinner talks, contact David Davies, The Old Boys' Network, email david@football1966.com , 01702 202036

Question: Which current England footballer won his first four caps under four different managers?
Answer: Ashley Cole